Supergirl: Through The Looking Glass
by Thor2000
Summary: A scientific experiment goes awry, propelling Supergirl into an alternate reality where she meets the heroes of that timeline and must trust them to get back to her own reality.
1. Chapter 1

Located off San Diego Bay, the West Coast metropolis known as National City was the shining jewel of San Diego County. It might not have had the scale of San Diego, but it didn't have the crime element or the accusations of illegal immigration that the cities of Chula Vista or Los Angeles suffered through. Known as the "Jewel of the County." It rested just south of San Diego between Interstate 5 and Interstate 85 on the National River, formerly the Sweetwater River in previous times. The Spanish conquistadors had founded the area in 1854 and had used it to graze their horses here; they had called it "Ranch of the Nation," but in 1867 when Andrew Johnson added it to the Union, he called it, "National Ranch."

The second oldest city in the county, the city had undergone several large housing booms in its history. Settlers arrived here looking for work in 1875 when it became a port on the West Coast, and it had huge housing booms after both of the World Wars, transforming the once sleepy Western community into a bustling metropolis on the level of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The summers were dry and the winters were mild. It may not have had the community of towns like Seattle or Nashville, but it possibly had the highest standard of living than most towns in California.

Dominating the cityscape was the building for Catco World Wide Media, but it also wasn't hard to pick out the structures for the local LexCorp or Lord Industries buildings. The Spanish might have founded this city, but industry had built it up. The commercial district was full of media and digital enterprises, and the industrial district on the side of the National River bordered several of the toughest neighborhoods in the town. In recent years, an enormous boost to the city's morale and tourism agency was the sightings of a mysterious young beauty in blue and red streaking in flight patterns over their heads amidst the skyscrapers and apartment buildings. According to the local tabloids contributing to her legend and reputation, she was one of the last denizens of a long lost extra-terrestrial civilization, one that had left behind another champion for truth on the planet. Those who debated the existence of such things swore she didn't exist. She was just a hallucination, an exaggeration from more normal accounts, but those who knew she existed celebrated and cheered for her victories. It was just a few months ago she had saved a plane crashing into the National River, and a few weeks after that that she defeated a terrorist calling himself or his organization Reactron. Two months ago, she had appeared to shut down a malfunctioning military project called Red Tornado. Since then, there were rumors of a terrorist agency lurking in the underground of the city, hoping to subvert it for themselves.

"You worried?" Former Daily Planet photojournalist Jimmy Olsen sat in a booth across from Kara Danvers at the Schuster Diner on Reeves Street. He twisted a French fry around in the ketchup on his plate and popped it in his mouth ahead of his hamburger. In front of him, Kara was picking at the last of her salad, pulling the left over detritus into one last spoonful.

"A little bit…" She looked up to him through her glasses obscuring her All-American looks. She had long faded brown almost blonde hair brushed backward out of her face, but she had been twirling the tip of it around her finger off and on at the table. Realizing she was doing to again, she pretended to be distracted a minute and freed her finger to finish her salad. "I know she's my aunt, but… how can I trust anything she says."

"What does your gut say?" Jimmy looked at their bill and pulled his wallet for the appropriate cash.

"My gut says…." Kara stopped and mused over her thoughts. "Ask Kal-El for advice, but if I keep going to him for advice, he's never going to take me seriously."

"There are worse choices you can make." Jimmy covered the bill as Kara finished her salad and sipped the last bit of soda and melted ice that had been her Coke. Sliding out of her seat, she checked her sweater for anything that had stained it from dinner and stepped quickly to catch up with Jimmy. A brief wave good bye to Louis the chef and the two CatCo employees stepped from the air-conditioned lighting of the diner out into the muggy summer air of National City. Mentally praying for a nice cool breeze, he looked up to the starry sky above and hoped for rain.

"Must be a thunderstorm coming…." Kara looked up.

"Now, how could you….."

Now he heard the distant thunder. Looking over to Kara, she looked up to him with a huge adolescent grin.

"I wish I had your ears." He heard her giggling. "So, what are you doing this weekend?"

"Oh, I don't know." Kara followed alongside him to her apartment building down the street. "Probably just laying around, resting, unless something happens."

"Yeah, I imagine having a secret identity doesn't give you time for a private life."

"Neither does being a personal assistant to Cat Grant." Kara rolled her eyes.

"Well, look at it like this…" Jimmy proposed. "You can't stay Cat's assistant for your entire life." When he glanced into the closed hardware store window, he noticed a flickering light in the reflection of the city on the glass. Turning around, he realized it was coming from the top floor of the Hancock Building, National City's equivalent to the Empire State Building until 1986 when the Siegel Tower went up and dwarfed it by a mere five floors. Over the years, it had been an office building and even a derelict for several years, the scene of several ghost stories by local urban explorers, but since it had been acquired by STAR Industries, it was the local seat for a scientific think tank working on projects for the government. Looking at the top floors blinking on and off, he wondered what kind of experiments they were working on at the moment.

"I wonder what they're working on." Jimmy wondered.

"I don't know." Kara looked around and noticed a strange breeze picking up. The dry litter in the street was waving around in the air and getting pulled north toward the Hancock, and the clouds in the sky that were once invisible were now starting to appear, forming a vague spiral in the sky over the building.

"I think Supergirl should possibly check that out."

"I think you're right." Kara handed Jimmy her glasses and hastened her footsteps across the street. Dodging around the pedestrians and locals weaving around her, she rushed past several stores for the alley way ahead of her and ducked down it immediately as fast as she could reach her. Turning into a blur of yellow and violet, she shed herself of her sweater and skirt falling to her feet and was nothing more than red and blue by time her feet left the ground. Ascending high over the top of the library, she weaved around the apartment buildings in her path and extended her curled fist ahead of her to balance her ascent. Ahead of her, the Hancock Building once twenty-two blocks away increased in size before her from a mere dot to the vast structure rising up before her. As she came closer, the wind currents she was riding upon seemed to be pulling her closer and closer. The flying debris around her alerted her to a much serious event happening, and upon reaching the top, she noticed the structure's skylights wide open to a huge room full of computer banks, several frantic physicists scrambling around and a huge ring of light in the far room glowing brightly and pulling in all the debris around the room.

"Professor…" Kara dropped down as Supergirl from the skylight in her blue costume and red cape, a red insignia was pulled across the cape. She had met Dr. Joseph Hofstadter in an interview as Kara with Miss Grant. He was one of the foremost specialists in his field specializing in dark matter. "What's happening?"

"Supergirl?" Hofstadter noticed her, fussed with his glasses and gestured to his experiment. "We were adjusting our telescope on the Orion constellation when it got hit by lightning and charged the surface, creating a cascade with our power source and somehow creating a small black hole in space. We tried shutting it down, but it's still pulling in power from another source."

"Circumference has expanded another twelve point eight decimeters." Dr. Moses Wolowitz came up to him. "If it keeps expanding at this rate, it will be five meters in an hour and the gravimetric forces will pull the building in with it."

"Is there any way to shut it down?" Kara asked.

"We could short circuit it." Dr. Lawrence Koothrapalli looked back at the bright glowing monster only sucking in trash and anything light enough to be pulled through the air. "But doing so would be dangerous. There's enough energy going through it to fry a side of beef."

"Anyone else maybe?" Kara looked at it. "What do you need to short-circuit it?"

"A bar of iron long enough to go across the opening."

"I'm on it." She lifted off again and shot up through the skylight, leaving the three physicists scrambling around reading the data from the activity created in their lab. The device was humming loudly, producing random bolts of electricity and pulling in the trash around the room. The paper from the wastebaskets was gone, the junk food wrappers were burning up in the air and the notes from the bulletin board were long swallowed up by the electrical gullet. Rushing through the city, Kara recalled the new high school being built in the Waynesboro sub-division and landed on the construction site. The workmen were using iron rods in the concrete foundation, and at eight feet long, they were perfect for the job they needed to do. Borrowing one, she turned and ascended to the sky once more, the five miles back to the Hancock Building flitting by under her as she hurried back to the top floor and dropped through the roof, ready to slay her dragon with her makeshift spear. Holding the iron rod across the opening, she felt the charged telescope sending a pulse through her body, vibrating her as if she was being hit by lightning.

"It's working!" Dr. Hofstadter called. "The energy signature is subsiding!"

Gritting her teeth, Kara closed her eyes and pressed the rod closer as the power going through the magnified telescope started sending feedback through herself as well. Even with her eyes closed, she could tell she was starting to glow from the neutrinos and protons passing through her. There were several short bursts of energy followed by one large one that blew her off and resulting in her losing her grip. The Hancock Building turned dark as the scientists cheered and hoped their computers had complete readings of the remarkable phenomenon. Kara however felt herself flying backward from the explosion; her head and feet spinning and rolling over and over from the experience. Opening her eyes, she was weaving and rolling over again, trying to correct herself. The blast seemed to have thrown her from the building, tossing her as far as the Hillsboro housing area beyond the Otto Binder Bridge. Composing herself, she hovered briefly to catch her breath, looked around once and started heading back to see the damage. Following Vannacutt Boulevard back into town, she dipped up with her arms balancing her to avoid a few electrical lines and slid over to Hull Street to enter downtown, but as she followed traffic past Gracey Street, she was distracted by another sound. It sounded like a security alarm going off near Carmichael. Coming to a stop, she stopped just thirty blocks from the Hancock Building, hovered for just a second to roll her eyes amusingly and realized her nice weekend was delayed another few minutes.

At the Carmichael Community Bank in the neighborhood, three men came racing out of the structure cursing obscenities and hurling profanity at each other. Former teller Leonard Howard came rushing out of the employee exit with three bags of cash, his brother Sheldon has set off the alarm in one of the windows from emptying the drawers. His buddy, Reggie Cooper, came rushing out behind them for their car in the parking lot next to the community center and noticed Kara in her blue costume and red cape dropping down behind them.

"Hi guys," She grinned effervescently. "Little late to be making a withdrawal, isn't it?"

Sheldon and Leonard looked at each other confused and dropped their bags to pull guns from their pockets. Kara then felt the pinpricks of several bullets striking and bouncing off her Kryptonian physique and falling in a littered pile at her feet. Smiling amusingly, she feigned a small yawn then bobbed her head amusingly as the thieves ran out of bullets and dived into their 1995 Ford Citation.

"Drive, get us out of here!" Leonard screamed to Reggie, but before the key could reach the ignition, they had another weird experience as the back of the car started rising up and the hood of their vehicle started tipping over to the asphalt. The girl was lifting their car! Screaming and yelling as they fell over each other, they became crowded on the ceiling of the car and suffered the indignity of not just being stopped by a girl but reduced to such as ignominious end. Police sirens filled the neighborhood as Kara left the car upside down with its tires sticking up and waited for the police. With the police cars pulling into the parking lot, she felt another presence hovering over her and looked over her shoulder. Suspended ten feet off the ground was another blonde heroine peering down on her with extreme surprise. Clad in a blue leotard with a short red skirt and large red cape, her arms crossed before the large red "S" on yellow emblazoned across her chest. Kara was just as stunned to see her as she was to see Kara.

"Where the heck did you come from?!"


	2. Chapter 2

2

At 6AM in the morning, Harry Clinton and his son, Barty Clinton, named for his grandfather, were up and about on their cattle farm twelve miles outside Acuff, Arizona. It was a small town of only 1,308 people, but they liked it. Harry had been raising cattle for almost seventy-five years, and he had risen this morning to fix the back fence on his property with his son before the mid-day sun rose, and the heat escalated into the triple digits. They were ten acres from the main house and repairing the barbwire fence when they heard the rumble in the sky above and looked up expecting to see storm clouds. When they looked up into the empty blue sky above them, they discovered two figures coming from the horizon going to Phoenix, speeding over their heads in speeds over a hundred miles an hour and disappearing into the distance of the Mogollon Rim several miles away.

Her hair flowing backward in her jetstream, Linda Danvers rose up and down in the wind currents she was riding. Aerobic and graceful in her movements, she was a ballerina in flight, bobbing in and around the younger Kara Danvers in this high speed flight clipping the northwest corner of New Mexico and approaching Colorado. Kara was grinning and laughing free from the pangs of her previous problems. Like two reunited sisters, they streaked across the skies of the nation, bobbing near and close to each other in the absence of gravity. Kara would tag Linda then streak ahead daring her to catch up, but when she came to a sudden stop a mere distance from Smallville, Kansas, Linda suddenly caught up with her and tagged her as well. Emerging from the Smallville Star newspaper office, Chloe Sullivan stepped from the building, arched her head to the two flying females and chuckled under her breath as they sped off toward the northeast corner of the state for Iowa.

In a few more minutes, the two almost divine young ladies were actually approaching O'Hare Airport and buzzing the surface of an aircraft. Passengers started whipping out cell phones to snap photos of the two flying females in the sky keeping up with the plane, but Linda gestured to Kara and the two were soon streaking across Lake Michigan, flying even more further east toward the Northeast United States. Below them, miles of suburban neighborhoods, dense woods, sparkling lakes and Midwest towns were speeding by under them. Her hands keeping her balanced in her flight, Kara looked up with sparkling admiration for the girl known as Linda Danvers. Their histories were almost identical. Both survivors of different Kryptons in separate realities, their lives were different versions of the same biography. Kara had been taken in by Jeremiah and Eliza Danvers of Midvale, California, who had treated her as their own daughter. Linda had been adopted and raised by Fred and Edna Danvers of Midvale, New Jersey. Both of their cousins had become famous media personas in the tabloid press under the name "Superman." Kara wanted to meet Linda's cousin, but she also wanted to know if she could get back home. If anyone could pull something like that off, Linda knew there was one man could do it living in New York City, and as the two Maidens of Might sailed on the cool Atlantic winds of the great metropolis, a red and blue figure in webbed attire swinging on a web landed on the tower of the Stanley Hotel off the West Side and gazed on the two attractive ladies flying into his city.

"There's two of them now?" He quipped in a stunned Tobey McGuire voice.

Gliding up Park Avenue twenty feet above the traffic, Kara continued following Linda to meet her authority on trans-dimensional physics. The trip had taken them across the country to Manhattan and up the side of a huge skyscraper at 200 Park Avenue known as Four Freedoms Plaza. Resembling a huge colossal spear with a small landing pad attached, Linda dropped down on to her feet on a small balcony to a figure laying in a deck chair with Kara right behind her. The young man tanning himself sipped his soda and set it aside to lift his sunglasses to the shapely beauty blocking his sun.

"Linda, might I say just how hot you are looking today." He looked over to the young beauty in the predominantly blue version of her costume. "You got a little sister?"

"She's not my sister…. She's passing through…" Linda responded. "Is Reed in?"

"He's in his lab."

"Johnny!" A loud gruff voice sounded inside the building.

"Gotta go, ladies…." Johnny jumped up to his feet and ran for the edge of the building to jump off. "Flame on!" His body burst into flames as he sailed off the building ahead of a huge seven foot tall man composed of orange rocks. A cream pie covered the top of his head where two eyes peered out from the rocky face of the creature. Kara posed to fight it, but Linda placed her arm before her.

"You've got to come back sometime!" Ben charged to the edge of the balcony. "I know where you live!" He shook a huge rock covered arm at the fleeing fiery prankster, wiped off the pie on his head then turned around to his company with his weight creaking through the concrete walkway. "Hey, Linda…" He noticed Kara. "You've got a sister?"

"She's not my sister…." Linda repeated. "Is Reed here?"

"Yeah…" Ben responded in his gravelly voice. "He's got something going on inside…"Ben led the way into the building with the two Maidens of Might behind him. Two steps inside, Kara tapped Linda on the shoulder.

"What planet is he from?"

"Earth." Linda answered as they followed the huge rocky hero into meet his best friend in the halls of the penthouse. Once the MetLife Building in its history, and later Stark Tower in recent years, the seventy-five story behemoth had been sold to Reed Richards recently by Tony Stark following the Sokovia Accords. The structure had the ideal wiring and clean energy required by Reed for his projects, and the power in it sustained his experiments without knocking out New York power grid as it did at his old location. In the bowels of the penthouse under the living quarters, Reed once again immersed himself in his work by assisting Stark long distance on the West Coast over telemetry readings in the area.

"According to my readings, your satellite detected a small burst of extra-dimensional space exploding over National City, California with signatures comparative but not wholly different to the one the Chitauri used when they invaded." Reed was reading the long-distance data being sent to him as Stark appeared to him above his console as a large holographic visual. "Now, it wasn't big enough for an army, but it was big enough for something to slip through, but whatever it was is long gone."

"The local news and media reports are giving me much to give on." Stark was patrolling the area between National City and San Diego in his Iron Man battle suit. "There were a few robberies last night, some kids stole a car and a little old lady dinged her car with the local drug store, but no one described anything resembling Predator or the Terminator lurking in the area."

"I thought Peter did the pop culture references." Reed looked at his wife Sue standing by his side. She was consumed with distressed worry. She and Reed had been involved with Arthur Molekevic, a mad millionaire in control of a subterranean empire in Central America when that alien race had invaded New York City. After defying the accused "Mole Man," they had returned to New York City to find the city in ruins and their home at the Baxter Building almost devastated. They had to see the carnage from the news outlets, but the thought of it happening again without the Avengers this time to help terrified her.

"Yeah, I guess the little doofus is rubbing off on me."

"Tony," Sue leaned in to be seen. "Have you seen or heard from Steve lately?"

"Uh, sorry… Going through a tunnel. Didn't catch that." Stark was crossing over the Hancock Tower and passing over the Jerry Siegel Bridge over the Sweetwater River in the National City of his reality. Below him, the locals were excited to see him in town. They saw Supergirl all the time, but he had not been in the area since he had moved to the East Coast. After crossing the river one more time, he suddenly wondered to himself. Where was the last daughter of Krypton?

"Hey, Reed, we've got guests." Ben called from the stairs to the living quarters, and Sue looked over to the bright red boots of Linda's Kryptonian attire coming down behind him followed by the more crimson boots of her younger counterpart. Sue and Reed exchanged brief glimpses with each other before welcoming Linda back into the fold as an old friend. Nervous and feeling out of place, Kara looked at Linda hugging each other then glanced to Reed distractedly bracing himself on his computer console. In the hologram, Tony peered past them to the missing Maiden of Might.

"Reed, Sue…" Linda began. "Let me introduce Kara Danvers… a visitor from another reality." She stepped aside to show off Kara in her alternate reality version of Linda's costume. Instead of red, blue and yellow like the Man of Steel, it was predominantly blue, and the red was darker, practically crimson unlike the bright red of Linda's cape. Kara shined her brightest smile and shook Sue's hand; she looked like how she remembered actress and model Jessica Alba, and Reed looked as distinguished as a young British actor.

"You got a little sister?" Tony's image spoke from the console.

Linda, Kara, Reed, Sue and Ben turned to look at Tony.

"That would be another explanation for the temporal disturbance we picked up." Reed realized as he reached out for a piece of equipment he had developed, his arm extending the extra five feet to pick up the device he wanted and contracting his arm once more to check his readings with Kara's presence. "If you don't mind me asking, what caused you to jump temporal boundaries?"

"I was shutting down an artificial black hole in a lab that exploded." Kara confessed."You can get me home, can't you?"

"Theoretically, yes…" Reed turned back to Stark on watching in the hologram. "Tony, how much that Chitauri technology is still available?"

"Which part?"

"The transverse warp technology." Reed answered. "If I can identify Kara's specific temporal signature and match it to a reality within the broad spectrum in inter-dimensional space, I might be able to theoretically relocate the remnants of her pathway and re-open it on this end, giving her enough time to pass back through."

"I'm on it."

"Hey, Parker…." Ben noticed the young man peeking in through the window of the lab. "Why don't you come in and say hello to Kara instead hanging outside the window?"

"I'm good…" The wall-crawler waved embarrassingly smitten by the second Girl of Steel, fired off another web line from his wrist and disappeared back on his patrol of Manhattan.


	3. Chapter 3

3

Kara had never been to New York City before in either her native reality or any other. Sue had loaned her and Kara clothing to go into the city for some sight-seeing and lunch, and along the way, Linda filled her in on some of the history of her reality. In Kara's timeline, the so-called Age of Heroes had started when her cousin had arrived on Earth in the Eighties, but in Linda's world, it had started forty years before when an Army recruit named Steve Rogers became Captain America to fight HYDRA. He was followed just a few months later by the appearance of Wonder Woman, who Kara remarked looked like the President in her native reality. Linda's cousin had arrived on Earth ten years before Kara's Superman, followed by media reports of the Batman, the Flash, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and several other costumed crime-fighters during the Chitauri invasion several years back. Following the Avengers recent break up after the assassination of King T'Chaka of Wakanda, billionaire Bruce Wayne of Gotham City, New Jersey had financed the creation of the Justice League of America for the government comprised of Superman, Wonder Woman, the Batman, Flash, Green Lantern and Linda herself as Supergirl. When Kara asked Linda about the X-Men mentioned in passing, all Linda could say was that they rarely worked with others. Meanwhile, as Kara was learning about these heroes, others were learning about her.

"I just heard about this new costumed menace flying through the city…" J. Jonah Jameson, publisher of the local Daily Bugle tabloid, stood in his twelfth floor office looking out the window and puffing on the stub of his cigar. "What are we going to call her?"

"I think they're already calling her "Super-Girl." His assistant Gus Hoffman spoke up.

"No, we're not calling her that." Jameson had the spark of an idea in his crafty mind. "I got it. Super-Babe." He posed smiling with his cigar butt in his fingers.

"That could get us prosecuted for libel, J.J." Publisher Robby Robertson spoke up. "Not to mention lawsuits from every woman's anti-defamation league in the city."

"How about Super-Chick?"

"More lawsuits…"

"Super-Blonde?"

Robby started shaking his head.

"How about Sky Girl? Can we get away with Sky Girl?"

"That might work…" Robby and Hoffman looked at each other. The nervous assistant editor even put two thumbs up to approve the decision.

"Great, what about photos? We need photos…" Jameson started puffing on his stogie again as he sat on his desk. "For once, I don't want those goons at the Daily Planet scooping us."

"Peter's here." Robby looked out the windows of Jameson's office and noticed the young photojournalist talking to Betty, Jameson's secretary at her desk. "Maybe he's got something?"

"What? Parker get in here!" Jameson's voice blared through the office like a hungry lion, shaking up several nervous columnists and employees. Hearing that roar, Peter shared a feeling of being unappreciated with the lovely young secretary and hopped up on to his feet. An orange envelope tucked under his arm, he nervously strolled into Jameson's presence, waving around Robby and standing next to Hoffman. Noticing the envelope, Jameson snatched it up from him without a word, surprising Peter with his brashness, and pulling out the photos in it.

"Crap… crap… crap… super crap…." The impetuous editor critiqued his work. It was several photos of the Kryptonian in flight or sitting on the ledge of the former Stark Tower; in one, the young heroine was sitting in a chair and laughing with Sue Storm. Peter must have used a telephoto lens from the Stockman Building across the way to get the shots. "I'll give you $150 for them."

"Perry White is buying them on the Internet at $100 a photo." Parker spoke up. He had nearly taken up the offer, but feeling an oath of loyalty to Jameson, he had held out until now.

"Dollars?" Jameson scowled in response. "Two hundred and not a dollar more!" He grabbed a photo of the young lady flying over the Bugle and passed it to Hoffman. "Run this photo. Caption should read, "Extraterrestrial Menace Looms over the City."

"She's not a menace!" Robby shot a look at him. "Is there anyone in the Avengers you haven't insulted yet?"

"The red head with the big bazongas." Jameson grinned with his stogie in his teeth, picked up his Black Widow bobble-head and shook her so it looked like she was nodding at him. Peter and Hoffman were soon rolling their eyes in their hurry to get out of the office, but Peter was actually in a run for the stairway where he was quickly pulling off his shirt to his red and blue webbed costume. Stashing his clothes in a forgotten maintenance box on the roof from the 1940s, he was almost immediately swinging off the roof in his secret identity and sailing up Broadway in a hurry to make the bay. Linda had promised Kara she would take her to see the Statue of Liberty and down the coast to Metropolis to visit her cousin, but as courteous as Kara tried to be, it was more urgent for her to get home, even if she had to hang around with Ben and Johnny at the Four Freedom's Plaza vying for her attentions, but as she returned, she found the place strangely serene and oddly abandoned.

"Sue?" She strolled into the penthouse. "Reed?" She descended back down into Reed's workshop and lab and stopped just a few feet from a strange box before her on the floor. It looked like a face, a man's flattened face squashed into a square container. After a few seconds more, she realized it was Reed trapped in this state by forces she did not understand. In the corridor to the elevator, she now noticed Linda sprawled across the floor in a green light. Weakened and slowly dying, she looked up with the green radiation filling her body, driving out the solar energy that created her powers. Realizing what it was, Kara turned around for the source of the light and was knocked to her feet by the force of another similar beam.

"I must offer Lex Luthor an apology." The hooded figure in the metal mask spoke. "He wasn't sure if the kryptonite of our reality would affect you." Her adversary glided over to her in the form of a Bond villain from the "Star Wars" universe. "If anything, you seem much more susceptible to it than our counterpart."

Kara struggled to lift herself up, but she felt dizzy, sick and nauseous. Her body felt as if it was being inundated by a billion needles all at once, her stomach and lungs felt like mush and her head had become a lead weight pressing upon her eyes. She could barely lift her head under the affects of the green kryptonite radiation.

"Who are you?" Kara gasped. "Why are you doing this?"

"Why?" An elegant voice came from behind that steel mask. "To see a world without cosmic-powered heroes, web-slinging morons or boy scouts in blue. A world with one infernal hero who can be taken down with one simple rock… A world that will soon know the name of Doom."


	4. Chapter 4

4

In the myriad multiverse of alternate time-lines and realities, there were counterparts to persons, events and organizations. In Kara's home reality, the Department of Extra-Normal Operations was possibly the nearest counterpart to the Strategic Homeland of Intervention and Enforcement Logistics Division of the Avengers reality. A detached government facility separated from the military, it had been founded to investigate and deal with suspected and alleged extraterrestrial activity ever since a certain blue-clad boy scout had arrived in Metropolis, Delaware claiming to be from another planet. With a command team of twelve officers and an extended force of over two hundred agents, it was their job to investigate UFO sightings, alleged alien encounters and send MIB agents to deter so-callen alien encounters. Agent Lucy Danvers entered the concealed government base under the grounds of National City's Highland Park and marched with asserted authority up to Hank Henshaw, the base's sole commander.

"Anything yet?" She looked over the analysts at their consoles then up to her superior.

"Nothing since last night." Henshaw confessed. "We know she was at the Hancock Building last night, but that was the last confirmed sighting of her."

"She's never been missing like this before." Lucy had a sensation of dread. "Hank, what if something happened to her?"

"Lucy, we'll find her." Henshaw reached out to comfort her. "We're patched in to traffic cameras all over the city, security systems, satellite systems… If she's out there, we'll…" He stopped as a massive reverberation filled the air, forcing the DEO agents to cover their ears or tear off their head phones. It was almost as if a massive cosmic cat had clawed at their universe, scarring it with its planet-sized paw. It lasted a few seconds, and then it was gone.

"What was that?" Lucy asked as she looked up to the monitors.

"Sir," One of the computer analysts called for Hank. "There's some kind of activity on Marshall Street near the Hancock Building." He placed the traffic camera footage on the main monitor, revealing a bobbing ball of light swinging and bobbing over the Marshall and Howland intersection. It was the size of a basketball at first and exuding lightning bolts, terrifying a few pedestrians and motorists, but then it expanded in size, rumbling as if it were a charged thunder cloud, but then it widened again to the size of a small car.

"It looks like…." Lucy was speculating. "Some kind of small wormhole."

"Send a probe into it." Henshaw requested.

"I did, sir…" His analyst responded. "Telemetry up now." A smaller screen popped up on the monitor showing tall skyscrapers on a blue sky, the Statue of Liberty in the distance and a human figure swinging on a web-line from building to building.

"That's New York City!" Lucy recognized the city but not the activity. "Why are we getting…" Their signal was suddenly and violently cut off. Back on Marshall Street, the phenomenon had expanded over the entire street; one car had vanished into it with its driver running out alone. A truck driver slammed on his brakes to avoid entering it, but as he started to flee, he looked back once and saw shadows in the vast barrier connecting alternate timelines. There was a human shadow in a hood and cloak, and a taller much massive figure coming with him ahead of an army of android drones.

"It smells here."

"It's smog, you steroid-addled idiot." Victor von Doom scanned National City through his metal mask. "We must be on the West Coast." He looked up to his seven foot tall behemoth once then heard the police car coming to investigate his initial wormhole activity. "And look, they sent the welcome wagon. Well, do what you do."

"With pleasure…." Known as the Abomination back home, Emil Blonsky grinned the same sadistic grin he had when he trashed Harlem. Charging up the street, he caught the police off guard, took their police car and crushed it under his fist before lifting it up and hurling it through the air, letting it smash somewhere between the eleventh and twelfth floors of the CatCo Building the next block over. He was soon hurling and smashing more cars as Doom fired lightning bolts at the street lights and traffic cameras. Blonsky had been promised he could take on this world's Superman, and Doom was going to surprise him with a weakness that had worked on his own cousin. In the few seconds since his arrival, they had three blocks of National City in a panic and news crews rushing to the spectacle. Many of the locals were screaming the same thing and searching the skies. Where was Supergirl?

Beyond the dwindling and weakening doorway dispatching Doombots, the web-slinger danced over the roof of one building and swung over Broadway in New York when he heard the buzzing sound on his hip. Letting go of his last web, he landed on the Weston Warehouse Building, looked around once and pulled off his mask to answer his cell phone.

"Peter, where are you?" His girlfriend responded.

"Just one more pass over the city, MJ…" Peter promised. "I'll be on time for dinner. I promise."

"I know Max Dillion is a big deal." Mary Jane was setting the table in her apartment. "But there is a chance he's not in the area. He might have left the city."

"I know." Peter shined a bit to relish a possible night off with his girlfriend. "I just wish I could be sure."

"Just come to dinner…" She forced a hopeful smile then chuckled under breath. "Or would you rather spend it with the Scarlet Witch."

"Wanda helped me just that one time!" Peter assured her. "I love you, MJ."

"Love you too, Peter." She clicked off, leaving Peter to jump off the Weston Building in his Spider-Man mask, casting another web-line, pulling it back and getting hurled into the air past the Stockman Building and sailing toward the former Stark Tower again. Having completed another reconnaissance around the city, he started climbing up higher and higher to get the most velocity to his swing and use less webbing to get to Mary Jane's building, taking a sure route to avoid the bathroom window and another awkward glimpse of reed's wife, Peter started crossing the windows of Reed's lab under the helicopter deck. Briefly glimpsing in to avoid Johnny, he noticed Kara lying prostrate on the floor of the laboratory just a few feet from Linda.

"Linda? Kara?" Peter's voice sounded concerned and frantic. He started pounding on the glass to save them, but the window wouldn't break. "Mr. Stark, what the heck did you make this out of?" He needed to break through this quickly, but even his strength wasn't enough to break it. Looking around, he noticed the Stockman Building two streets away and turned toward it, using one web line along the way. It was only five stories shorter and after landing on the roof, Peter attached one line to the southwest corner and another to the south east corner with webbing firing at high speeds from his wrists. Pulling them back tight, tighter and tighter still, he wondered how much this was going to hurt. Stepping off the edge and hanging on to his giant slingshot, he stepped off and was hurled at such speed he was crashing through the window of reed's lab almost instantaneously. A slight tuck and roll on arrival, he grabbed up Kara and Linda in his webs and pulled them to safety beyond the kryptonite radiation before seeking out the hidden Kryptonite devices, webbing them up and dropping them in Reed's fissionable material bin.

"Kara?" Linda felt her head stop pounding and rolled over to the young girl. "Kara? Are you okay?"

"It hurts when I breathe." She struggled to lift herself up. As Spider-Man, Peter found Reed trapped into Doom's pressurized box and upon trying to tinker from it, he caused it to explode, bursting the rubberized scientist from his compact hell.

"Thanks, Peter…" Reed stood and staggered a bit from Doom's merciless Plexiglas prison.

"What happened, Doc?" Peter looked around. "Were you attacked?"

"Victor surprised me." He hurried over to the remains of the portal he had been designed to send Kara back to her native reality. "He took the Chitauri transverse warp generator; he must be going to use it to access Kara's world."

"What?" Kara was still recuperating from her Kryptonite poisoning. Thankfully, its effects weren't cumulative, and she could start recovering once she was removed from it. It seemed more lethal than the Kryptonite of her world, but it wasn't her worst problem right now. "He's gone to my world? I have to stop him!"

"It's not that simple!" Reed confronted her. "I can create the gateway, the signature of your reality is imprinted in your RNA, but the warp generator is the most important part. Without it, there is no way to build up the kind of power to create the gateway. The amount of electricity would knock out the entire Eastern Seaboard just trying to hit it. I can't just generate that level of power in this lab. Victor took the only device that could hit it."

"Reed…" Kara crossed her arms before her. "What kind of power are we talking about?"

"Let me put it like this…." Reed collapsed defeatedly against his work table. "When was the last time anyone saw Thor?"

"Wait a second…" Peter had an idea. "There might be someone else."


	5. Chapter 5

5

The security alarms at the Valley National Bank on Fourth Avenue were still blasting full force. The noise could be heard for over three blocks as five police cars had arrived at the scene expecting a normal bank robbery, but nothing was normal whenever it concerned Max Dillon. A former Con Ed employee, he had taken a massive electrical hit one winter two years ago from an underground cable and probably should have died, but instead he walked away with a massive power over electricity, allowing him to screw up electrical devices, shock people with discharges of electricity and send the city into chaos with huge blackouts. To the public, he was largely known in the tabloids as Electro.

"Hello, officers…" The pompous egotist stood looking at the street filled with flashing patrol lights. "Don't worry about me. I'm just making a little withdrawal." He started forth with two bags of cash and silver certificates and almost twenty guns on him, but there was a cracking of a web-line in the air, a red and blue figure sailing through the air and Dillon cocked his face up to the huge spider eyes sewn in a stocking mask.

"Hi, Max…" Spider-Man hung down from a street lamp. "What cha' doing?"

"Spider-Man!" Max shined to meet the guy that sent him to that prison designed by Tony Stark. "What? Did you forget the ass-kicking I gave you last Spring?"

"I remember." The web-slinger never took his eyes off Dillon. "That's why I brought friends."

Max looked to Spider-man's left and recognized Johnny Storm covered in flames as the Human Torch ready to take him on. To his other side, Kara hovered with her arms crossed over her chest. Recognizing her, Dillon chuckled a bit.

"Well, you must be that young lady I read about in the Bugle." Dillon was chuckling. "Sky Girl, right? I must say… you're prettier in person than in your photo."

"Thanks…."

"Come on, Max…" Johnny was ready for him. "You can make this easy…. Or you can make this difficult."

"Really?" Max looked up to the three heroes with a smug. "How about a little more power?" He blasted the web-slinger with his best burst of electricity, sending the wall-crawler dodging from his path as Johnny took flight. Kara took him head on, sending enough electricity through her to fry an ordinary man, but it barely fazed her. Getting lifted off his feet as the lights up and down the south side of Manhattan to dim and struggle to stay on, he was sending enough voltage through her head to make her eyes light up, but she wasn't trying to fight him. She was abducting him.

"Tell me, Max…" The wall-crawler had sailed up ahead, preparing a huge web suspended well over Fifty-Fifth Street and Seventh Avenue. "Is this the first time you've been touched by a girl?"

"What's the matter, Spidey?" Dillon felt free fall after Kara tossed him into the web. "Scared to tussle with me on your own?"

"Nope, just doing a little scientific experiment..." Spider-Man watched as Johnny came in red hot. He knew Max was going to sear through his web in seconds, but they had to separate him from all the innocent by-standers first. Luring him away from the scene, they had him out in the open away from hostages, and Johnny had him trapped in a circular wall of flames. As Dillon was firing miniature lightning bolts at his attackers, he was completely unaware of the fourth party coming up on him with a battery storage pack designed to drain off the power he was wielding. Firing at the web-spinner and the maiden of might, Dillon watched the harness getting pulled over his head as he defended himself. He spun around as Sue Storm shifted back into visibility.

"Oh, come on!" Dillon screamed. "Can't a dishonest man make a living anymore?"

"Reed, we got him!" Sue called her husband on her ear piece.

"Contain him!"

Sue erected a spherical invisible field around Dillon just as he tried to blast her with the electricity he wielded. She winced just briefly as he almost shocked her, but she had him contained as the power Dillon was pulling in was being absorbed by Reed's device. At the Tower, Reed was reading and watching his dials as Dillon conjured up enough electricity to power a small house for a month.

"Sue, can you make him angry?"

"Angry?" Sue stood on the sidewalk trying to keep the volatile criminal contained. "You want me to make him angry?! Why don't you come down here and make him angry?!"

"Sounds like my cue…." Ben Grimm came charging up the street as the Thing to catch up with the action. "It's Clobbering Time!"

"You've got to be kidding me…." Dillon watched as Grimm came charging at him, scooped up Sue's invisible shield with him in it, and started dribbling it around the street and thoroughfare like a basketball. He treated Electro as if he was Michael Jordan with a basketball, pounding him around the street, along the crosswalk and off the side of the building, turning the villain in the force field into a super-charged Dyson sphere with Dillon disappearing inside the ball into a huge sphere of electricity.

"Ben…" Reed communicated with his team as his gear tried and struggled to charge the doorway to Kara's reality. His eyes watched the needle on his eqipment vibrating crazily as it tried to climb to unheard of levels. "How angry can you get him?"

"Oh, I haven't even started!"

"Isn't this a little cruel?" Kara was hovering near Spider-Man clinging to a billboard poster.

"Nyah…" Parker spoke. "Max loves this stuff. We tangle with each other three, sometimes four times a month."

"I'm going to hurl!" Dillon was screaming as he tried blasting himself free.

Resonating on a separate band of time in the multiverse, the National City that had seen Kara Danvers appear from nowhere and save Flight 237 near the Otto Binder Bridge was under martial law. A horde of Doom bots had taken over the city's TV, radio and Internet; many of the streets were littered with wrecked cars, building damage and carnage after the Manhunter's battle with the Abomination. The Martian hero almost had the upper hand, but Doom had technology that fried even his alien physiology and left him comatose. City hall had been pillaged, the police department crippled. Citizens and locals were warned to stay off the streets as the two villains took over the city accompanied by a horde of Doom Bots under the control of their master. Walking in the office of CatCo Media Enterprises with his scowling hulking partner, Victor Von Doom marched into the petite media empress's office ready to pose his ultimatum to the city.

"Nice office…" Victor looked around. "The mayor once had a nice office… Once."

"What do you want?" Cat skittishly stood behind her desk.

"I hear you're at the top of your field in your profession." Victor strode further as his voice echoed in his metal mask. "You're going to deliver my message to the country."

"And if I don't?"

"Then my companion…" Victor gestured to Blonsky having his hand wrapped around Jimmy Olsen's head as was pushed into the floor. "Starts hurling your employees out the window, and, as you've noticed, it's a very long way down…." Jimmy looked terrified, but Cat was trying to cover up how much she was shaking. Blonsky was grinning eager to crush the photojournalist's head like a dried cashew.

"You'll never get away with this." Cat trembled. "Supergirl will stop you."

"Oh, didn't you hear?" Victor menacingly tread closer to her. "I managed to neuter your little Kryptonian watch dog. She won't be bothering us." He noticed the view with the streams of smoke coming from the ravaged city. "Now, shall we begin…. perhaps in front of the windows… I think people will like the view."

Cat nervously stepped to the side of the room and sat in the chair. Draping his cloak over his arm, Victor sat across from her as another drone came scooting through the office, past Jimmy being controlled by the gamma-muted monster and the other employees. Employee Winn Schott was under his desk dialing and redialing the same number over and over trying to contact the girl he knew as both Kara Danvers and as Supergirl. The probe meanwhile extended its antenna and radar dish, unclicking its camera setting and starting to televise the unfolding terror. Cat looked at the two foot tall mechanical droid then back to Doom.

"Citizens of National City…." She started speaking from under the stress. "I am here to introduce you to Victor Von Doom, who just over three hours has devastated our city, destroyed our police force and has quite possibly killed Supergirl…" Tears were falling down her face. "Superman, if you can hear me… please help us."

"Yes, Superman…" Doom stood defiant once more. "Come save them." He reached into his cloak. "I've got this darling relic of the old homestead I'd love to show you." He extended his right hand with the glowing green meteorite rock in it. Cat recognized it; it was kryptonite, the one thing that could kill Superman or Supergirl. On the other side of her head, she heard the sound of a churning turbine, looking back out the window as a figure in blue started rising up in to view on a open flying craft, but it wasn't the Man of Steel. He was tall, dark and dashing with white temples, the poise of a British actor and the warning gaze of a man who had battled evil before. With him in similar blue costumes was a blonde Jessica Alba lookalike, a red and blue figure in webbed attire, a giant orange rock man, a man made of fire and not one but two Supergirls! Upon seeing them, the Abomination tossed Jimmy across the room and snarled angrily under his breath.

"Victor," Reed spoke defiantly. "Would you like to take this discussion outside?"


	6. Chapter 6

6

"Reed…." Doom's voice resounded condescendingly. "You're here too?"

"It's hero-smashing time!" Blonsky crashed through the windows and tried to knock off the Thing's head, the two of them falling down the side of the building, punching and hitting each other back and forth as both the Supergirls flew after them. Striking the ground sent a reverberation across three city blocks. Blonsky hit Grimm, Grimm hit him back then Blonsky sucker-punched him in the stomach and sent him into the shawarma place across the street. Behind him, Kara and Linda approached him together trying to kick him over. Their blows together almost worked, he had started toppling, but he struck out with his fist to smack them both, then grabbed them by the hair and struck their heads together like coconuts.

"You ladies are out of your league." He laughed at them. "I've taken on the Hulk! You've got no chance!"

"That's it." Grimm downed a free shawarma and came crawling out of the wreckage. "No one hits a girl on my watch and gets away with it!"

In CatCo Worldwide Media, Cat hid under her desk as Doom fought Reed and the Spider-Man. Sue cast invisible shields to protect the employees, but the Human Torch went to help Ben against the Abomination. Reed tried restraining Victor by stretching all over his body, but Victor fried him with an electrical jolt through his armor. The webslinger tried to blind Doom with his webbing, but the Latverian despot blasted him out of the building. A streak of webbing to catch the outside of the building, and the wall-crawler was swinging around, pounding Doom hard and sent him crashing down Cat's private's elevator.

"Ma'am, are you okay?" Sue crouched down to Sue under the desk. "Are you okay?"

"Who are you people?" Her eyes were widened to see their abilities.

"Believe it or not, the good guys."

Getting set on fire, Blonsky took a street light and smashed Johnny with it across the street, sending him through the fifth floor of Carney Electronics. When he tried hitting Spiderman, the hero's spider-sense allowed him to dodge and weave every swat, even once sticking to the lamp and covering up his eyes. Peeling the webbing from his face, Blonsky felt Ben punching him again and again, trying to take him down. Linda tried another martial arts move to kick him to the back of the head as Kara took another tactic, grabbing up the monstrous brute and taking him airborne, but Blonsky wrapped his fingers around her tender throat and started squeezing, gleefully crushing her windpipe just as she let go and sent him plummeting back to Earth under his own weight. On the way up, Linda weaved around him coming down to check on Kara.

Exploding from the elevator shaft, Doom groaned from the hard landing and strolled from the elevator shaft slightly limping. In the reflective building lobby, he saw Johnny land behind him.

"Victor, you're coming home with us?"

"Why should I?" Doom took a fire extinguisher and started spraying him. "I like this world." He extinguished the famous Johnny Storm, but a string of webbing caught his weapon and pulled it away. From behind the mask, Peter started webbing him up from the face to his arms and feet.

Out in the street, Blonsky had hit hard, creating a giant pothole in the middle of Main Street. Ben kept punching him over and over, trying to slow down the monster's recuperative factor, but Blonsky slipped in one punch and sent Ben sliding down the street into a garbage truck. As he turned around, Linda landed after taking care of Kara. The two of them looked at each other like sisters then to their attacker.

"Now!" Both girls blasted the monster with their heat vision, but even that wasn't enough to break through the beast's thick rhinoceros-like hide. Feeling his chest and head heating up to peak temperatures, Blonsky pictured himself beating them to death and kept forcing himself further and further. Getting closer to hit them, he suddenly felt a ball of energy around his head. Sue had a force field on him. He might have been stronger than the Thing and the two Supergirls, but she knew he needed oxygen to breath. Cutting off his access to air, Blonsky powerful body started wavering, breathing in his carbon dioxide, he lifted his huge arm to crush Kara gritting her teeth to defend herself then watched him starting to fall over to the ground. After the Abomination collapsed, Ben dropped a garbage truck on him.

"You sank my battleship..." Victor had defeated Parker by electrocuting him and turned to see his gamma-spawned beast of a partner go down hard. The streets were now filling with his Doom Bots, but it was looking how Sokovia back in his world must have looked to Reed as he watched Ben inundated by the hundreds of battle-honed robots. Kara and Linda were handling themselves by ripping apart the hordes of mechanized monsters or frying them individually with their heat visions. Johnny was frying through them as fast as he could. Under his breath, he wanted to cheer every one of them Ben destroyed, but he couldn't let the big guy know he really liked him. In the mezzanine of Catco, Reed and Victor fought back and forth. The rubber scientist evaded all of Doom's lightning blasts, the impact was frying the walls of the building. The street if not much of the block was turning into a war zone with endless Doombots battling the heroes, pieces of the monster robots filling the streets. Through the melee of heroes and robots, something else was emerging through the street. A tall green specter in a yellow cape rose from the street and traveled through the carnage in an immaterial state. Around him, the robots struggled to attack him and instead crashed into each other. He looked at Kara with a familiar look and mused at the site of Linda with her similar powers and near identical costume. Over his head, he noticed Johnny flaming red hot as the Doom Bots tried attacking him. Seeing the garish green specter, Ben was dumbfounded as the other-worldly presence passed like a ghost past a very dizzy Peter Parker and through Reed Richards to face Victor Von Doom.

"Victor Von Doom..." The voice of Hank Henshaw presented himself in his true Martian form. "You do not belong in this reality! It is time for you to go!" A beam of psychic energy emerged from his head and attacked the mad despot. Henshaw saw visions of Doom as an angry boy in Latveria, a pompous college peer of Richards's and as the mad man who had tried to defeat and destroy Reed Richard. A piercing scream shattered through Doom's memories and skull and a guttural groan came up from his lungs as the armored opportunist finally collapsed, and with him, his Doom Bots controlled by his neural-link went down as well.

Reed and Sue exchanged brief glances.

"Dr. Richards..." Henshaw became solid once more. "Please take your war back to your universe."

"My promise..." Reed and Henshaw shook hands with each other. From there, the crisis on infinite worlds seemed over. Peter webbed up Doom for travel and Linda carried him back to Reed's craft. They had just a few minutes before the doorway closed, stranding them all. Citizens were cheering to see Supergirl with these new heroes, and Linda was shocked and surprised to be asked to sign autographed. Peter had just a brief chance to sign "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" a few times as Reed called him back to head back home. With the laden craft lifting up, Kara looked up to Linda and waved to her once more a sisterly grin, but her vision was soon distracted by another sign of movement. One of the inert Doom Bots suddenly snapped on-line and hoisted itself up onto its feet. It lifted off heading straight to the Fantastic Four.

"Reed, look out!" She lifted off to stop it.

"Kara!" Hank tried to stop her.

"Reed..." A voice came from behind Richards. "Did you really think you'd take me so easily?"

The Doom Bot exploded and took out the entire craft. Peter saw Kara coming in close, and then everything went dark. It was once day, and now it was night. The Fantastic Four and their vehicle was gone, and he was plummeting down over Times Square in New York City. A webline exploding from his wrist, he just missed hitting the ground and sprung back up into the sky. Landing on the Ed Sullivan Theater, he caught his breath, pulled off his mask and looked around from the roof over the street.

"What the hell happened?" He looked around for Reed and the others. Why did New York City seem so dark? There was also a weird new smell to it. It seemed dingier than usual, more crowded and the traffic even worse than it usually was. The streets were also shining wet, yet it hadn't rained in weeks. Was this his New York City, or was it Kara's? As he tried getting his bearings, he heard the familiar creaking of web and the sound of another presence landing near him. Another person stood rising up before him in a Spider-Man costume, but he was slightly taller and thinner in size, and the costume was darker, more garish as if created in a horror movie studio. His curious eye-pieces looked like the reflective eye-pieces from a designer set of eyeglasses.

"Who the heck are you supposed to be?" A young man's voice came from behind the mask.

Elsewhere in the myriad worlds of alternate timelines, Ben Grimm had impacted the street hard. Lifting himself up, he noticed Johnny hovering over him surrounded in flames, but the brash young hero landed and turned to himself again.

"Ben, you okay?"

"Yeah," Ben dusted himself off. "It's just another pothole in the street." He looked at the terrified on-lookers. They looked shocked and distressed to see him. The cars looked weird. They looked like sleek armored versions of 1940s cars. There were few sports cars, and the buildings looked odd, almost surreal with extreme clean angles and straight windows. "I'm gonna kill Victor when I get him."

"You're not killing anyone, Rock Monster!" A voice called out and a figure in white and blue rode ahead of a tall ice bridge quickly emerging out of the air around them. From his hands, he froze the water out of the air trying to freeze Johnny, but a quick "Flame on!" and the young hero was battling his attacker. Ben's rocky face looked stunned as the two quarreled and fought it out between him, but his gaze soon came into view of the huge muscle-bound guy with blonde hair wearing a red suit with a black mask and black shorts. The costumed hero punched Ben in the jaw and stood amazed when he didn't go down.

"That's impossible!" Bob Parr cried out as Mr. Incredible. "Nothing has ever taken that hit."

"Mister..." Ben grinned as he rubbed his jaw. "You just made it Clobbering Time."

Trapped in Kara's reality, Linda Danvers had been thrown into the stratosphere over the Western Coast of the United States. Regaining her senses and equilibrium, she extended her right hand forward and descended back down to earth into the troposphere and through the water vapor of the cloud cover over the planet. The heat on her descent was drying the air before it could form on her, and her eyes scammed the coast and landmarks to pick out the location of National City once more. In this world, Los Angeles didn't seem as vast as it was in her world. She was seeing cities where small villages should have been, and wildlife in regions where her reality had highways and towns. As the ground began rising up to her, her eyes locked on to San Diego Bay and the signs of skyscrapers and civilization became turning into the human world, she fretted on Reed and the others. She was almost back to CatCo when two figures dashed across her view struck her hard and spun her around in the air several feet.

"Kara..." One of the two men turned to confront her. They were two middle-aged men but in extraordinary shape. Both of them wore black bodysuits, but there was something about them Linda didn't like. "Your Aunt Astra demands your presence, and... You're not Kara..."

"She's dressed in her clothes?" The other one was confused. "And why is my hand hurting from striking her?"

"Oh, I've heard about you idiots..." Linda had heard of the Kryptonians freed from Kara's version of the Phantom Zone. "And you've picked a really bad time to get on my bad side."

In yet another reality, sections, chunks and fragments of a strange craft were raining down on Empire Street in Metro City. Sue Storm was falling unconscious to the street, and Kara was quickly streaking across the canyon of tall spires and white and silver skyscrapers to catch her. Some of the buildings even had fixtures of gold, and the streets were darker than black, filled with a technicolor pattern of cars and vehicles of every size and sort. Upon reaching Sue, Kara held on to her and slowed down her speed, lightly turning in the air and dropping down on to a brilliant white sidewalk with a park of incandescent green grass. Opening her eyes, Sue gasped as her feet touched ground. Around her, pedestrians stopped and watched in stunned excitement.

"Sue, are you okay?"

"Yeah..." The Invisible Woman held her head. "My ears are still ringing. Damn, that Victor..." She looked around at the stunned by-standers. "Why are they looking at us like that?" She looked around again. "Why does it look like we're in a cartoon?"

"Sue, who's tall and blue with a giant bald head and a small black goatee?"

"Kara, this is no time for riddles..." She looked up to where she was pointing and noticed a large air-turnie craft suspended over the street. The blue guy with the large head dressed in black was looking over the side accompanied by a huge robot with a fishbowl full of water replete with a large green fish in it.

"Hola, lovely ladies... Welcome to Metrosity!" He welcomed them.

"Metro City. It's Metro City..." The fish was talking. "When are you every going to get this?"

In yet another alternate reality, billionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne stood in a mirror and adjusted his suit. It was black, made from German cotton, and his blue tie was from French silk. He was tall and handsome with just a bit of silver speckled through his temples. A bit of cologne, and he turned out of his bedroom and down to his foyer where his stalwart manservant Alfred Pennyworth waited for him. The dutiful butler further dusted off his employer.

"Sir, you told Miss Gordon you'd meet her at Seven."

"Correct, Alfred..." Bruce checked and rechecked the ring in his pocket. This was the night. After three years of dating, he was going to ask Barbara to marry him. "It's time for us to embrace the future and retire our dual identities. With many of our old foes gone or permanently incarcerated, it is time for a life of freedom and happiness."

"And I agree wholeheartedly..." The faithful retainer hope to see Wayne Manor filled with children again. "But, sir, if I may ask, what would Gotham City do without both Batman and Batgirl?"

"Well, Dick has been doing very on his own in his solo career." Bruce confessed. "And as Nightwing with his own intrepid band of crime-fighters, he has more than..."

An echo of the past returned to haunt him. An old red phone under a dusty glass cover was ringing on his desk in the study, but the room was a mere facade to the secrets it held. It had been over a year since it had last rang, and upon hearing it once more, Bruce hoped it might be nothing. Maybe another consultation. Commissioner Gordon had been in office five terms, and he was looking forward to retirement.

"Yes, Commissioner?" Bruce answered the phone.

"Batman, I need you to come to the courthouse immediately." Gordon's strained voice responded.

"Who is it? The Joker? Riddler? King Tut?"

"He calls himself... Doctor Doom..." Gordon looked over to the armored figure in the black cloak. He had thought the man was a mere entertainer or eccentric, but he had electrocuted Police Chief O'Hara and future Commissioner Samuel Black. Downstairs, the first two floors of the courthouse was a war zone of rubble, debris and unconscious police officers.

"Yes... Let's meet the Caped Crusader..." Victor's voice echoed behind the mask.


	7. Chapter 7

7

After Gotham City Penitentiary had been closed down in 1978, many of its regular inmates had been transferred to the New Jersey State Penitentiary on the grounds of the former Army base north of town. However, Governor Robert Kane had signed a bill in 1975 that transferred all of the state's notorious costumed criminals to Gordon Island located on a small island in Delaware Bay. It had been faithfully patterned on Alcatraz, and the high security was under the purview of the United States Military given the high escape rate of its prisoners from regular jails. However, they had never encountered anyone like Doctor Doom before. In less than thirty minutes, he had taken over the prison, freed the costumed criminals and was threatening to bomb Washington D.C. if his demands weren't met. Strapped to six of the twelve missiles were the forms of Robin in his Nightwing garb, Batman, their world's Wonder Woman and Batgirl along with the Green Hornet and Kato, two so-called criminals who had been caught trying to free the Batman. Their colleagues in their world's Justice League had been manhandled, brutalized and nearly crippled. It was almost as they had never dealt with a serious threat before in their careers.

In the prison, the last few members of the Batman's considerable rogue's gallery was a shadow of what it once was. The Riddler's impostor had been killed years ago by a fiend calling himself the Green Goblin. The second Catwoman had disappeared in a war between the Joker and the original Riddler, and a few like the Sandman, the Minstrel and Shame were suffering from physical ailments that allowed them to be moved to minimal security. With barely a foe to match his power in this universe, Doom had managed to convert the prison basement into a factory turning out more of his Doom Bots. Hampered by this world's level of technology, he rationalized that time moved slower in this universe. While his home world had the Internet and micro-chips, this world was still yet to discover cell phones and personal computers, but Egghead's intellect was close enough to his own to get the gear and equipment they needed, even if they had to use prison finances to buy their parts. Standing and watching the US Navy at guard around the island, Doom grumbled in his mask to the sound of the Joker in his orange prison garb dancing through the halls of the guard house wearing Batman's utility garb while the the Riddler, the Penguin and the Bookworm stood guard on the deposed heroes. Off shore, more American battleships were coming to sail the outer perimeter monitoring the situation. It was a dire situation, and Doom was in charge... even as a dark and silver-haired boy in blue suddenly appeared over the island.

"Mister..." The retired Kryptonian hero had emerged from retirement to face the horror. "I don't know who you are or where you come from, but I'm giving you one chance to give yourself up."

"Do you have one of them in that universe you come from?" The Joker asked Doom.

"Oh, yes..." Doom's voice echoed. "And I'm very ready for him." The Latverian despot reached deep into his cloak with the blue boy scout diving head first into the prison. This world's Superman looked to be a middle-aged man in his Late Sixties, and his costume looked like a hand-me-down from a Hal Roach short. The belt was too high, his cape was a flimsy red table cloth and his build looked as if it might be padded, but one sight of that green fragment of meteor struck him with alarm and he started wavering in his flight. That sick weakly feeling was starting to overcome him already, and despite his size and grace, he started faltering and stumbling like a gawky cheerleader before falling to the feet of the foreign criminal. His face at the feet of Doom, he had to struggle to lift his head to him.

"Interesting... It seems our Kryptonite is much more virulent to you than I thought." Doom's voice echoed. "You should have stayed in those 1940s serials." Doom rose and turned to check on his new Doom Bots. Both the Joker and Riddler now laughed with glee, and Freeze used his gun to freeze the kryptonite to the Kryptonian hero. Even the Penguin and Bookworm looked down from captured guard towers cheering and laughing. He had did it. He had actually did it! Doom had taken down the most powerful superheroes of their world. He had stripped Wonder Woman of her mystical gifts, nearly crippled the Flash and humiliated the Batman but taking down Superman was a major feat.

"Take him down to detention and lock him in a cell." Doom ordered. "I don't want anyone free him too soon."

"Just one question, Mr. Doom..." The Joker looked up with his ghastly white face as his underlings carried off their new price.

"Doctor..."

"Doctor Doom..." The Joker was a bit wary of anyone who could fire electricity. "But what now? We have the prison. Why not take Gotham City now to force the President's hand?"

"Taking a city is easy..." Doom replied as the Joker and Riddler followed along with him. "Holding it is something else. We must let the nation know we mean business, and with innocents in danger..."

"Still say we should kill the Batman!" Penguin groused. "Keeping him alive is dangerous. He has escaped from every trap we've every put him in. Every trap!" He clanked Doom's armor with his umbrella. "How do you stay fresh in that thing..."

"You failed because you got careless." Doom responded. "I have prepared for every contingency... There is no place for him to go." He returned to the prison workhouse to check on his new Doom Bots. "Egghead, how are these new Doom Bots working out?"

Once meant for turning out license plates and cheap mail boxes, the building was now holding equipment stolen from the Gotham City area Ford Manufacturer. Instead of cars, it was creating shells of Doom Bots being fitted with animatronic skeletons stolen from the amusement park. The brains were designed from arcade games, the lasers developed from scratch. Scrambling and cowering under the imprecise shaking machination, the wily bald scientist was thinner than he was fighting the Dynamic Duo. His face was sullen, his eyes still a brilliant blue, but his mind was still as nefarious as ever.

"They'll be up to the best standards I can produce." Egghead looked nervously at the Abomination lifting and hoisting the altered equipment into place. "If your steroid-addled friend can stop damaging them as fast as I can create them."

"I'm getting sick and tired of the comments coming out of your white pasty mouth." Blonsky's entire hand wrapped around the criminal scientist's bald head and threatened to crush it like a real egg. "I'm not the one who couldn't take out one comic book geek in a cheap Halloween costume."

"Oh, and many times did you get your posterior handed to you by this big green monster you keep complaining about?"

"Enough with the sniping, you idiots!" The Joker spoke up. "We are so close to living like kings under our new benefactor, Doom the First." He started laughing. "I'm so going to love being Mayor of Gotham City, and who better to be my new County Commissioner than my good friend, the Penguin."

"Thank you, Joker..." The short silver-haired crime boss thanked his associate of crime, but even he missed the a small slight figure phasing in and out of view from the doorway. It was thin and ethereal with the shape and form of a thirteen year old girl. Dancing insecurely back up the walkway to the prison, it paused and looked up to the caped crusaders hanging upside on the rockets aimed for the city. The Riddler's crazy laughter squealed loudly as he shocked the Batman with a cattle prod for trying to undo his restraints, but instead of getting involved, the shade fled to the direction of the main building and stole secretly down the stairwell to the basement and the location of the block of ice holding the Man of Steel of this reality.

"Oh, geest..." The voice of Violet Parr made her pop back into visibility. "They froze the rock to his chest. What am I supposed to do?"

"Vi..." Sue's voice came through her earpiece. "Picture a little bubble under the rock, and imagine yourself make it expand into one of your biggest force fields."

"Honey, be careful... these are dangerous people." Her mother was on the same channel.

"Jesus, mom..." The long haired brunette rolled her eyes. "You're embarrassing me in front of the other superheroes." She placed her hands on the huge chunk of ice containing the dying hero and pictured the bubble as Sue had described, picturing it getting larger and larger. Nothing was happening at first. She wasn't sure what she was doing wrong, but then she heard crackling in the ice. Her force field not only exploded the ice, but it sent the kryptonite shooting across the basement and through the bars of a cell. As Violet was flung backward on to her back, a hand reached out and caught her from hitting the floor.

"Hello, young lady..." The steel jawed man stood over her and looked up and down her red and black costume. "Thank you very much..."

"You morons would still be locked up if I hadn't showed up." Doom was arguing in the workhouse with the villains he had allied himself with from this reality. "You only only had one man in a purple costume. I've gone up against the Avengers, the JLA, Superman, the Four and several others... plus a wide-ass kid shooting webs and much of the New York criminal underground!"

"Well, Mister Hoity Toity with the fancy metal suit and foreign kingdom." The Joker stood up to Doom. "What we lack in quantity, we make up for in quality. I was the one who turned the Gotham City Water Supply into strawberry jelly and faked an alien invasion that had the whole city freaking out. What have you done..." He felt tugging from the Batman's utility belt and looked down to a cherubic eight year old with short blonde hair in a red and black costume trying to take it.

"Hello..." The boy yanked the belt and disappeared in a cloud of dust. The Joker and Penguin looked confused, but Doom started blasting at the boy racing around the room.

"He's trying to help the Bat!" Doom screamed firing electricity at the boy. "Stop him!" They watched as the bratty speedster started racing through the machine making the Doom Bots, loosening this, breaking that and then there was the damage Victor was making himself. More shocked by the superhuman speed of the youth, the Penguin and Joker could barely keep an eye on him, but Egghead's perfect machine was falling apart as Dashiell Parr eluded the plotting villains before disappearing in a small ball out the window. His disappearance signaled the sound of loud rock and roll music from the prison yard. Loud and obnoxious, it was nothing but musical junk, and as Victor scrambled outside, his head looked up to the massive flying craft held aloft by five turbine engines. Standing next to the robot with the fishbowl head, Reed Richards stood up with his family and Megamind at the helm.

"Victor..." He implored once more. "It's time to go home." He looked as if he meant it this time.

"Reed..." Doom looked up defiantly. "I'm afraid you're going to need an army to do that." He stood among Gotham City's worst criminals... The Joker, The Penguin and Mr. Freeze whose ice gun had been updated with new technology. With him, the Archer, False-Face and Bookworm before a rogue's gallery of gangsters with stolen rifles, henchmen and angry underlings all backed by the Abomination.

"Oh, we've got an army..." Reed answered. Superman appeared in the air with two Supergirls, Metro Man, the Human Torch and two Spider-Men swinging off the guard towers. The Thing and Incredible Man appeared at the front gates, and Fro-Zone slid down to the yard on a bridge of ice manifested from the air. Behind him, the Batman, former Robin in his Nightwing costume and Batgirl stood with other heroes from their world. Wonder Woman stood reclaiming his lasso and bracelets from Sue Storm. The Flash and Green Lantern stood with a mission to face off with Doom, and Helen Farr took her kids to safety as the Green Hornet, Kato, Hawkman, Black Canary and Batgirl brought up the rear. MegaMind had used his equipment to track their movements through the multiverse, and in doing so, had encouraged a few more allies to battle this time-line hopping villain.

"Let's get ready to rumble!" Minion cried out from his fish bowl as the two forces clashed. The Man of Steel came down on the Abomination hard, but even by himself he couldn't fight the beast by himself and Metro Man and the Thing came in to help him. Watching the two Spidermen fighting alongside each other was fascinating to watch. The way they eluded and dived around the criminals untouched fascinated Violet and Dashiell with the young boy trying to imitating their movements. Fro-Zone faced off with Freeze, but a blast from Megamind took down the evil doctor.

"I borrowed it from a guy named Gru." Megamind confessed and admired his own freeze gun.

As Metro Man and the Thing took down the Abomination, Incredible Man helped Reed with Doom, pushing the battle back into the prison. The Human Torch was creating walls of flame to control the criminals from retaliating; many of them had never seen a man covered in flame tossing fire in their lives. Even the Riddler found himself outmatched and was loose in the prison. As the Flash was rushing prisoners back to their cages, Batgirl took down the Joker and the Archer by herself. Wonder Woman was binding and capturing villains for the Flash to return to cells. One minute the Penguin was swatting and dodging from Kato, and then he found himself whirled back into a random jail cell with Bookworm.

Upstairs, two Spider-Men had worked to web up many of the loose convicts. Many of these men had battled the Batman and even the Green Hornet, but they had never dealt with one guy much less two who could shoot and spin webs.

"Good work, boys..." A police officer in a dark dress uniform came up to them. "Name's O'Hara, I'll take it from here."

"Is your spider sense going off?" One Peter asked the other.

"Yeah, is yours?" The other Peter asked. The looked at each and webbed up O'Hara in a thick blanket of webbing, causing him to fall over as his false face split on impact and peeled off his face.

"So, it just shoots out of your wrist?" Peter asked his counterpart.

"Yeah, pretty much..."

"Why didn't I get that?!"

Overwhelmed by Mr. Incredible, Metro Man and the Man of Steel, the Abomination finally went down. The Green Lantern quickly bound him in bands of solid green energy as the two Supergirls lifted him up to the new dimensional portal created by the efforts of MegaMind and Mr. Fantastic. This device wasn't just powered by one of the former villain's portable arc reactors, it had a computer system that scanned the subject's RNA sequence, identified their own dimension and returned them back to see it. Upon see his gamma-spawned muscle disappearing into it, Doom turned to flee the prison but Kara quickly descended to recapture him. Maybe it was revenge for what he had done to her world, or maybe it was for the attack on Four Freedoms Tower with the Kryptonite, but Doom was not escaping her this time. His thundering feet stomping down the pier, he stopped twenty feet from the boat that might lead to his solace when she dropped down in front of him.

"Well, if it isn't the girl from nowhere..." He tried hitting her with the electricity off his armor, but she barely flinched from it.

"You attacked me, you decimated my home..." Kara stood before him repulsed by his existence.

"But it wasn't your home." Doom grinned under that tarnished metal mask. "Your home exploded several years ago... Remember?" He produced another green meteor rock from a pocket in his costume. Kara's eyes widened at the sight of that glow through his fingers. The Kryptonite from Linda's world was somehow much more virulent to her, hitting her much more quicker, driving the solar energy from her body much more efficiently. Used on her, she felt like a marionette with its strings cut, and she suddenly went down to her hands and knees on the dock. Struggling to lift her head, her blue eyes glimpsed up to Doom standing over her...

And the length of webbing scooping up the kryptonite and yanking it away from him. On the police cruiser behind her, Spider-Man landed on the roof with the lethal rock.

"Sorry, Doomsie," Parker's voice grinned under that mask. "You do know that's an illegal foreign object. We have to keep this fight fair."

"You annoying accursed..." Doom was quickly knocked over by Kara regaining her strength under the Gotham City sun. He blasted her with enough electricity to knock down the Thing, but on her Kryptonian physiology, he might as well had hit her with a mud pie. Unfazed by his attack, Kara lifted him high up off the prison dock and carried him back to the prison yard. Much of the fighting was over, many of the villains recaptured, and the prison staff were coming out to meet heroes they knew and had never heard of. LInda and Reed looked up as Kara came down fighting to be released from her, his relentless blasts were lighting her up as if she was a toy doll and on landing, she gritted her teeth, spun him around until she had him lined up and then threw him back through against his will. All Victor saw was a flash of light, and he came to rest on the floor of the penthouse at Four Freedoms Tower at the feet of five faces he would rather not see. Iron Man and War Machine stood over him ready to fight. Natasha Romanoff had his shackles read to deport him to Latveria, and the Vision and Scarlett Witch were their back up.

"Two points, yeah." The alternate Spider-Man was impressed by her precision. A few feet away, Reed's Spider-Man chucked and covered his face with his hand embarrassed.

"MegaMind..." Reed took charge. "We have to get all these extra heroes back home." He looked to the native Batman and privately mused that he seemed older than the counterpart of his reality, but yet, had the frame, stamina and stature of a Hollywood leading man. "Batman, you have it from here."

"Yes, Professor Richards..." Wayne spoke under that dark purple cowl. "And thank you very much."

"Kara..." Reed turned to his first promise. Looking around the myriad heroes standing tall and proud, the Kryptonian Princess looked around the ruined prison yard of heroes and prison staff and turned first to Kara, the two of them sharing a sisterly hug. As Linda dropped a leather pocketbook down around her head to take up, Kara turned to this world's Superman. Sure, he was older and grayer than her cousin, but he had those same big blue eyes and the same steely grin.

"I don't know if there's a Supergirl in this world..." He grinned to her as if she was her dad. "But I'm sure she's just as wonderful as you are."

Linda just grinned and turned back to Reed. The Incredibles had already departed, and so had Metro Man, eager to return to retirement. He nodded knowingly to her as she walked into the gateway and was sent beyond the boundaries of dimensional space.

"Another thing..." Reed looked to the former villain. "Destroy Doom's technology. We don't need anyone in this world using it."

"Don't think we need to worry about that." Megamind and Minion looked over the the old metal shop. Still struggling to obey, Egghead's versions were just a bunch of clanking, trembling skeletal metal bodies fighting to stay together. They jaws flapped like ventriloquist dummies, their eyes were only barely lighter than a penlights and upon reaching the prison yard, the first one fell over and knocked down the rest like dominoes.


	8. Chapter 8

8

In National City, the city courthouse looked like a war zone. Half of the building had been bombed and was supported by timbers, employees were scrambling and working overtime to reorganize offices and clean-up crews were carrying out barrels of broken brick, ruined furnishings and shattered office chairs. Seventeen police officers were in the hospital, replaced by members of the local State Police. The elevators were still out, and employees and staff were left to use the stairs. Parts of the floors had holes in them, but the local citizens could finally look up and see their familiar red and blue garbed Supergirl in the sky. Sure, she didn't look like the pop-star version with the yellow belt and fuller figure, but they felt safe again knowing she was back.

Across town, ruined androids were being collected by Cross Enterprises. Five street lights were out, and volunteers were guiding traffic as employees tried to rebuild the city. FEMA had been alerted, and what passed for normalcy in a reality where everyone knew extraterrestrials were commonplace incidents was slowly coming back. At the shattered courthouse steps, thirty-two reporters from area newspapers waited for the mayor to show up and give a statement. Surrounded by his cabinet and protectors, Mayor Gary Lockwood, finally appeared. A silver-haired Liberal Democrat who had welcomed Supergirl the month after her first appearance, he grinned to the TV cameras and vans and took out his prepared speech.

"My Fellow Constituents..." He began. "It is with proud vigor that I am glad to reveal this city still thrives and will continue to exist after the debacle we have just endured. We will not kowtow to a foreign villain from any world who tries to subjugate us. The armies of Doom have been defeated, and your city is returning stronger than ever thanks to Supergirl and her friends. We will be stronger than before, we will stand firm before those who try to destroy us, and we will return to who we always were. Thank you..." He smiled and turned away as the news and media reacted to fill in the details the readers wanted to know.

"But sir!" A reporter called out. "But who are these other heroes? Where did they come from? Where did they go?"

"Is the Spider-Man another alien?"

"What do we call these people?"

"Why was there another Supergirl?"

Cat Grant turned off her television and looked to Kara now dressed in her civilian identity. A blue sweater. a white blouse and a light powder blue skirt with round glasses perched on her nose with her dark blonde locks pulled back tight into a ponytail, Kara now finally saw the damage to her place of work. The walls had to be pulled down and rebuilt. The power wasn't constantly going out, and the Internet was off-line. Computers and desks had to be replaced, many of the windows had become empty metal panes and Cat's personal elevator was going to be out for the foreseeable future, but the worst was yet to come. Sitting at her desk, the petite media mogul turned from her TV screens and glared disapprovingly up to Kara.

"You have been gone for three days." Her lips spoke with annoyed frustration. "You better have a darn good excuse for where you were while our city was entering the fifth level of hell."

"I'm sorry, Miss Grant..." Kara felt like a punished little girl. "But I was kind of stuck out of town and couldn't get a signal..."

That was basically the truth depleted of all extraneous details.

"I tried getting through to you, but the details of course were an obstacle."

Okay, that might be pushing it.

"Are you telling me you were trapped outside of city behind the roadblocks?"

Kara couldn't admit to that. She knew that would be lying.

"You do know with my contacts I can easily check your story." Cat reached for the phone. "What officer did you speak to?"

"Captain Hank Henshaw..." Kara produced a card from her fingers. Taking it from her, Cat looked at the tiny scrap of paper. It was creased, slightly worn, with the words Captain Hank Henshaw, Office of the United States Army, in bold black letters with an American border motif. She looked at it once, back to Kara and back to the phone number on the card.

"Get me a double latte with half milk and lettuce-wrapped crisp." She requested as Kara quickly jotted down the request and rushed to fulfill it. "Oh, and there will be more talk on this matter later!" She then dropped to her seat with her arm curled up before her and the tip of her finger to her bottom lip, the card still nestled in her fingers. Ever curious, she took her cell phone and called the number. The line hummed a bit.

"Captain Henshaw's office..." A voice responded, and she hung up the phone than press the debate.

She never did bring it up again. Kara spent a happy day with her normal life and normal job. She delivered Miss Grant's office and typed several papers, running several articles to print and picking up Jimmy's photos of the battle between the Four, Peter and her counterpart. She also stopped to to see Kara's adventures while briefly trapped here being televised. An errant window washer's platform caught after coming loose, teenagers in a stolen car and rescues from a house fire in the Breckinridge community. Upon seeing her big beautiful beaming face in the TV, a tear fell down her face. She missed her already. Her wit, her effervescent personality, her positive outlook... She had both found and lost a sister.

Huddled on the sofa of her apartment, Kara's eyes glanced back on the leather purse Linda had given her. It contained three outfits and a set of shoes from that other New York City, but in the bottom was something else... A small metal flash drive with the crest of the House of El on it. She wore the same insignia on her costume, so did Linda and the other Superman. Curious and intrigued, she turned off the TV and turned to her personal computer. Hoping the computer programs in each universe ran parallel, she pushed in the drive and came upon a compressed video. In the file, the image of a handsome figure of a man appeared with bright blue eyes, dark hair with a curl over the top of his forehead and a broad royal jawline. Wearing a white shirt with a loose blue tie dangling from an unbuttoned collar, he sat back in his seat and shined a big grin as if he was an overgrown boy scout.

"Hello, Kara, I'm Clark..." He introduced himself. He was certainly a taller Clark Kent than her cousin, but he was nowhere as old as that other Clark. He was dashing and handsome like a movie star, but with the vulnerable charm and humility of a young boy.

"I apologize for not getting a chance to meet you, but sometimes the responsibilities of being part of a major metropolitan newspaper have to come first. Linda can't stop talking about you. She seems to have bonded with you more than she has ever bonded with me. I'm glad she had a chance to meet you, and for the chance for you to come into her life."

Kara felt a suppressed giggle coming up from her chest.

"I'm sure my counterpart in your reality must be quite a good person too. Maybe someday all four of us can meet and learn how are similar and how we're different. You see, I've visited a few parallel timelines myself, and despite what differences we have, we all seem to be bound by one principle to lift as many others to be as great as they can be. Being a role model isn't the worst thing to be in the world, but having the realization that we have shaped someone's life can be the most positive experience one can have.

"I hope you're happy, and I hope you never take your powers for granted. You don't need to have super powers to be a hero. You don't need to fly or repel bullets to be a positive role model. Kara Danvers can be just as much a hero as someone who swings from a web over the city or wears a bat costume in a dark cave. When you're not Supergirl, take a minute to help someone who needs it, remember someone who may feel forgotten and don't forget there's always someone who needs a friendly smile. I hope you take these words to heart because there's always much more we can do to help.

"Again, I'm really sorry I didn't get the chance to see you. I'm sure you're a beautiful smart caring girl, and it would have been an honor to meet you. Give your Clark my best, and best wishes and fortunes to yourself. Hopefully we can meet again some day under the best of circumstances." He smiled and leaned back in his seat with one hand clicking off the video to the Daily Planet insignia. With that pleasant thought, Kara leaned back into her seat with her own beaming grin herself. When she turned her gaze to the window, she wondered if Linda was thinking of her as well.

END


End file.
